1 A multimodal approach to children’s development of humor in family life
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Aliyah Morgenstern
Abstract
The development and production of humor (McGhee 1979) involves all semiotic resources at the child’s disposal. It is embedded in social-cultural contexts and requires specific cognitive, interactional and linguistic skills (Thalander and Aronsson 2003). Patterns of humor development depend on children’s construction of these skills and on parental modeling or support for the child’s efforts at humor. Adults transmit their socializing practices in their daily spontaneous exchanges with their children (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984). It is thus essential to study humor in its natural habitat: daily interactions. In this chapter, we analyze the development of humor in two longitudinal follow- ups of children between 1 and 7 years old recorded at home in daily activities (Morgenstern and Parisse 2017). We use a multi-linguistic level and multimodal approach involving detailed analyses of phonology, pragmatics, discourse, gesture, facial expressions, gaze, posture, and taking into account children’s linguistic, cognitive and social development. We study how children exploit the resources available to them within the discourse context and enter a collaboration in which the adults, as experts, provide important scaffolding. We analyze the reception and production of marked expression of amusement and humor with their specific acoustic, facial and gestural components. The results of our analyses help us describe the paths the children take to go from first instances of shared amusement initiated by the adults, in which they produce mainly reactive multimodal behavior such as smiling and laughing, to their own production of successful humor. The children in our dataset are at first willing participants who express their amused reactions, but they are progressively socialized into becoming co-operative actors (based on Goodwin 2017) who initiate humor by combining their verbal, gestural and prosodic skills in interaction.
Abstract
The development and production of humor (McGhee 1979) involves all semiotic resources at the child’s disposal. It is embedded in social-cultural contexts and requires specific cognitive, interactional and linguistic skills (Thalander and Aronsson 2003). Patterns of humor development depend on children’s construction of these skills and on parental modeling or support for the child’s efforts at humor. Adults transmit their socializing practices in their daily spontaneous exchanges with their children (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984). It is thus essential to study humor in its natural habitat: daily interactions. In this chapter, we analyze the development of humor in two longitudinal follow- ups of children between 1 and 7 years old recorded at home in daily activities (Morgenstern and Parisse 2017). We use a multi-linguistic level and multimodal approach involving detailed analyses of phonology, pragmatics, discourse, gesture, facial expressions, gaze, posture, and taking into account children’s linguistic, cognitive and social development. We study how children exploit the resources available to them within the discourse context and enter a collaboration in which the adults, as experts, provide important scaffolding. We analyze the reception and production of marked expression of amusement and humor with their specific acoustic, facial and gestural components. The results of our analyses help us describe the paths the children take to go from first instances of shared amusement initiated by the adults, in which they produce mainly reactive multimodal behavior such as smiling and laughing, to their own production of successful humor. The children in our dataset are at first willing participants who express their amused reactions, but they are progressively socialized into becoming co-operative actors (based on Goodwin 2017) who initiate humor by combining their verbal, gestural and prosodic skills in interaction.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Introduction 1
-
Part 1: Face-to-face interactions
- 1 A multimodal approach to children’s development of humor in family life 15
- 2 On target. On the role of eye-gaze during teases in face-to-face multiparty interaction 53
- 3 Humorous Smiling: A Reverse Cross-Validation of the Smiling Intensity Scale for the Identification of Conversational Humor 87
- 4 Alternative conceptualizations of the Smiling Intensity Scale (SIS) and their applications to the identification of humor 109
- 5 Facial gestures and laughter as a resource for negotiating humor in conversation 131
- 6 Multimodal humor in human-robot interaction 169
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Part 2: Mediated interactions
- 7 Facial expressions as multimodal markers of humor: More evidence from scripted and non-scripted interactions 209
- 8 Emojis and jocular flattery in Chinese instant messaging interactions 231
- 9 More than laughter: Multimodal humour and the negotiation of ingroup identities in mobile instant messaging interactions 263
- 10 Humour and creativity in a family of strangers on Facebook 289
- 11 “Loanword translation and corrective acts are incongruous”: Debating metapragmatic stereotypes through humorous memes 319
- Index 355
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Introduction 1
-
Part 1: Face-to-face interactions
- 1 A multimodal approach to children’s development of humor in family life 15
- 2 On target. On the role of eye-gaze during teases in face-to-face multiparty interaction 53
- 3 Humorous Smiling: A Reverse Cross-Validation of the Smiling Intensity Scale for the Identification of Conversational Humor 87
- 4 Alternative conceptualizations of the Smiling Intensity Scale (SIS) and their applications to the identification of humor 109
- 5 Facial gestures and laughter as a resource for negotiating humor in conversation 131
- 6 Multimodal humor in human-robot interaction 169
-
Part 2: Mediated interactions
- 7 Facial expressions as multimodal markers of humor: More evidence from scripted and non-scripted interactions 209
- 8 Emojis and jocular flattery in Chinese instant messaging interactions 231
- 9 More than laughter: Multimodal humour and the negotiation of ingroup identities in mobile instant messaging interactions 263
- 10 Humour and creativity in a family of strangers on Facebook 289
- 11 “Loanword translation and corrective acts are incongruous”: Debating metapragmatic stereotypes through humorous memes 319
- Index 355
